Poole worked as a journalist campaigning for social reforms including an end to child labor. On the outbreak of the First World War he worked as a war correspondent for The Saturday Evening Post. His Family won the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1918. His Family, a portrait of a New York family, begins: He was thinking of the town he had known. Not of old New York-he had heard of that from old, old men when he himself had still been young and had smiled at their garrulity. He was thinking of a young New York, the mighty throbbing city to which he had come long ago as a lad from the New Hampshire mountains. A place of turbulent thoroughfares, of shouting drivers, hurrying crowds, the crack of whips and the clatter of wheels; an uproarious, thrilling town of enterprise, adventure, youth; a city of pulsing energies, the center of a boundless land; a port of commerce with all the world, of stately ships with snowy sails; a fascinating pleasure town, with throngs of eager travelers hurrying from the ferryboats and rolling off in hansom cabs to the huge hotels on Madison Square.